The Best Carnival-Inspired Recipes

The magnificent, colourful, completely mesmerising Notting Hill Carnival has been a London summer highlight for the past 52 years, and the 2018 extravaganza promises to be just as spectacular as ever.

The carnival first took place in 1966, and celebrates the culture of the West Indian community in the UK capital, with brilliant costumes, tempting street food, traditional music and sensational dancing taking over Notting Hill every August Bank Holiday Weekend.

More than one million people take to the streets to join in with the party each year, soaking up the fabulous atmosphere and sampling the incredibly tasty food on offer at the event.

If you can’t make it to the carnival this year or you just want to recreate those gorgeous Caribbean flavours for yourself at home, then you need to acquaint yourself with these mouth-wateringly good recipes:

Think of Caribbean food, and jerk chicken is most likely what immediately springs to mind. Whether you serve it with a salad, with chips (cooked in your Tefal ActiFry, of course), or slow-cooked and made into patties like in this lip-smackingly good recipe from Baking Queen 74, that gorgeous mix of spices always hits the spot.

Use your Tefal Cook4Me for the slow-cooking part, and cheat with shop-bought pastry if you like; it won’t make you a jerk – geddit?

Goat isn’t a meat we tend to eat all too often in the UK, but it’s a star of several Caribbean dishes, including an authentic Jamaican curry, which African Bites explains how to make from scratch in her brilliant recipe.

Goat has a relatively mild flavour and is quite tender when cooked – it’s fairly similar to beef brisket in terms of texture.

The sauce for this curry features scotch bonnet chillies, so it’s not for the faint-hearted when it comes to spice!

Most of us probably tend to think of fish pie as a creamy, cheesy, mashed-potato heavy winter comfort food dish, right? Well, we’d like to change the way you think about fish pie forever with this sensational Caribbean-inspired version from Lucy Lorna 1990.

The fish is cooked in coconut milk, rather than a traditional stodgy white sauce, and it’s finished with a sweet potato topping for added flavour. Herbs and spices permeate that coconut milk filling, turning this into a fish pie like none you’ve ever tasted before.

Now for a side dish; these reggae reggae chickpeas from We Don’t Eat Anything With a Face! would make a perfect accompaniment to any of the above dishes, thanks to their beautiful mix of spices – which includes chilli powder, thyme, Reggae Reggae sauce – and the fact that chickpeas are excellent for soaking up a flavoursome sauce.

This recipe is also packed with veg like tomatoes and onions, and it’s vegan-friendly. What more could you want from a side dish? It sure beats boiled potatoes, eh?

Mango is another quintessential Caribbean flavour, and caramelising it takes its magnificent taste to a whole other level, making this cake from Vintage Kitchen a true showstopper bake.

The sponge cake has swirls of caramelised mango running throughout, and is finished with a seriously tempting rum glaze for a boozy twist. Queen of Baking and Booze-filled Desserts HRH Mary Berry would love this.

Of course, bananas are the other fruit most likely to jump to mind when thinking of the tropical foods of the Caribbean, and this recipe for a beautiful banana bread from Eat Like a Girl teams them perfectly with coconut and lime for a truly exotic bake.

We’d even go so far as to argue that this is better than chocolate chip banana bread, and it’d go absolutely excellently with a homemade lime curd. Here’s a recipe for one from Crazy for Crust to get you started – a true party for your taste buds.